(no subject)
Nov. 26th, 2001 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioMy officemate just got here. She has a daughter who goes to school near DC and who was home for Thanksgiving, so the plan had been to drive her back to DC yesterday and then return to Pittsburgh. In a correctly-functioning world, that trick would take about 9 hours, which isn't bad if you're competent at the distance-driving thing (which I am not, but Janette gets lots of practice).
Thanksgiving weekend can never be described as "correctly functioning" when it comes to traffic involving DC (or Baltimore), though. I go to a convention near Baltimore every year, and traffic on Sunday is always a little wonky. Most of that wonkiness is in the eastbound direction; I always see extremely heavy traffic on the PA turnpike from Breezewood to Pittsburgh. Our direction is usually pretty good. There must be a lot more people who flee DC/Baltimore for the weekend than who go there.
This year was much worse than usual. (I'm guessing that the number of people who drove instead of flying places increased.) It took us 45 minutes to get from I-70 to I-76 in Breezewood, a distance of about a mile. All of the toll booths were open; there was just a ton of traffic. It probably took about 10 miles on the actual turnpike before traffic was behaving normally for us. The other direction, as usual, was hosed.
Remember that I said Janette was going to drive from Pittsburgh to DC? She left Pittsburgh around noon and told me that when she hit the turnpike traffic just plain *stopped*. Much worse than usual, she said -- people were getting out of their cars, walking dogs, talking to each other, etc. So she bailed and headed for I-68 (I'm not sure exactly how she did this), and *that* was slow and sometimes stopped. Then she headed for non-interstates (she mentioned 522) and even *they* were kind of bad. It took her over 8 hours to drive to DC, and she decided not to come back until this morning.
Next year I'll bet she tells her kid to take a train. :-)
Thanksgiving weekend can never be described as "correctly functioning" when it comes to traffic involving DC (or Baltimore), though. I go to a convention near Baltimore every year, and traffic on Sunday is always a little wonky. Most of that wonkiness is in the eastbound direction; I always see extremely heavy traffic on the PA turnpike from Breezewood to Pittsburgh. Our direction is usually pretty good. There must be a lot more people who flee DC/Baltimore for the weekend than who go there.
This year was much worse than usual. (I'm guessing that the number of people who drove instead of flying places increased.) It took us 45 minutes to get from I-70 to I-76 in Breezewood, a distance of about a mile. All of the toll booths were open; there was just a ton of traffic. It probably took about 10 miles on the actual turnpike before traffic was behaving normally for us. The other direction, as usual, was hosed.
Remember that I said Janette was going to drive from Pittsburgh to DC? She left Pittsburgh around noon and told me that when she hit the turnpike traffic just plain *stopped*. Much worse than usual, she said -- people were getting out of their cars, walking dogs, talking to each other, etc. So she bailed and headed for I-68 (I'm not sure exactly how she did this), and *that* was slow and sometimes stopped. Then she headed for non-interstates (she mentioned 522) and even *they* were kind of bad. It took her over 8 hours to drive to DC, and she decided not to come back until this morning.
Next year I'll bet she tells her kid to take a train. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2001-11-26 11:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2001-11-26 11:48 am (UTC)